My Current Availability: Looking for the right long term fit.

I am NOT available for contract roles of any kind. I am only open for a conversation about FTE roles, but please remember anything you offer me will need to be market competitive.

I am ALWAYS open for networking, especially if you are not a recruiter as I'm actively trying to get out of consulting and contracting.

I am NEVER interested in relocation from Seattle/Washington State, so please don't ask.

I am NEVER interested in roles outside of the Seattle/Bellevue/Redmond/Tacoma triangle in WA state, unless I can work remote at a rate above and beyond market.

Want my attention? Read the below F.A.Q. and know the details, be competitive, and reach out in ADVANCE with an offer that gets my attention in a positive way.

Availability: Frequently Asked Questions

I'm not the sort to normally promote myself, but I often get asked to interview by companies looking for somebody with my wide range of technical and leadership skills and it is not uncommon for me to get thousands of these sort of requests a week. Due to this, the following page was created so I could just copy and paste the link to recruiters who may need this data.

The contents of this page may NOT be used for used for ETA-9089, USCIS Form I-140, or Visa Petition of any kind.

Executive F.A.Q.

Do you have experience as an Executive?

Yes. Both with start-ups and Fortune 50 companies. My role has always been on the engineering side, where I feel I can be most effective.

I'm lost and I need advice.

How can I help you?

Tell me your problems. If I can't help you, I will tell you so, And usually if know your real needs I can tell you who can help you.

We use a third party vendor/staffing company. I'm not so sure about them. I need advice.

Tell me the details and I would be glad to give you my personal opinion based on my real life experiences with them.

If needed, I can even direct you to better alternatives that will fit your needs and goals better.

We need somebody like you on our Board of Directors. Are you available?

Contact me directly with your expectations. I'm always open to a conversation.

Will you do free work for my for-profit company?

Would you do free work for mine?

Will you relocate outside of Seattle, WA, USA for any reason?

No.

We hired you months ago and we love the work you are doing so we want you to relocate to our main headquarters in another state so you can be closer to the rest of the leadership team..

No. I'm not interested in moving outside of WA state for any reason, even in this sort of situation. I consider this sort of request to be unethical on your part. No role I ever accept will move me from Seattle.

Can you handle our technology needs?

Statistically, yes.

Contact me directly with your expectations. I'm always open to a conversation to see how I can help.

My new company needs a technology guy. Would you be our CTO and help us get a pre-revenue MVP out the door by doing all the work/code?

Statistically, No.

I get these offers to be a companies only developer in exchange for title bloat all the time, and I have yet to get an offer I cannot turn down.

Would you give me full founder status, equitable and vested preferred stock, at least one seat on the board of directors under my control, be honest about your needs and expectations, and put all these in legally binding writing? If Yes, then lets talk.

My company wants to hire you. Do you do "interview homework" in the form of free projects or free consulting work?

No. Please see the above about free work.

No, I do not do what is sometimes known as "homework".

I now flat out REFUSE all interview requests that ask me to do such "homework" as to me the request is a red flag that the person asking is not ethical.

In the past I was more free with my expertise but I soon found companies often wanted free work or just wanted free MVP's they could have the cheapest team possible iterate on.

I got tired of building entire companies from scratch by providing free MVP's while getting none of the value I was providing for them myself.

No, I will not make an exception for you or your company, for any reason.

I have no problem white-boarding something or going through a normal in person technical screen, but interviews where you have to do a project outside of the normal scope of an interview are illegal under WA law as I understand it as explained by Legal Council, and so I refuse to expose myself to legal risk by working with companies that attempt to enforce them as I believe that this speaks badly of the character and leadership abilities of the organization and its leadership.

I consider companies and individuals making these requests to be unethical and actively malicious to the technology world and the people in it.

Recruiter F.A.Q.

I'm a recruiter who works only with FTE roles.

Great! I'm sick of contracting and staffing companies, lets talk!

I'm a recruiter who works with FTE roles, but I have a great contract for you!

If you are offering me contracts, then you are not offering me a real FTE role.

I do not work with recruiters who do "bait and switch". I'm not interested in it.

Just because a job has a w2 tax status, does not mean you can call it a FTE role and get away with it.

If the job is a W2 tax status role at a company that does staffing or managed projects, it is not a real FTE role and I'm not interested.

If its a contract, just please be honest and call it out as one early on.

I'm a recruiter. Either I or my company messed up and now you won't work with me. What can I do to make amends?

I am not the sort to hold a grudge. I told you what to do, so do it.. and all is forgiven. Don't remember? Ask again and I would be happy to tell you.

If you just got unlucky with the wrong employer, that is a bigger issue. Usually its money owed to me, or an abusive policy that I disagree with because it discriminates against minorities, the disabled, or women.

Contact me directly for these sort of issues.

I'm a recruiter. I want to offer you a MSFT Contract role..

I am not interested in any sort of MSFT Contract role for any reason.

Reason: I am currently waiting on a cooldown/break in service to finish from doing managed projects in the past and would not be able to accept the role anyway.

Reason: I hated working at Microsoft as a Perma-Temp and don't want to go back to that life.

I have a number of issues with the company based both on personal experiences and from data collected from people I know personally who either have worked there as full time employees or are there now but seeking to leave. This has lead me to feel that working at AMZN is both economically unsound and antithetical to my personal goals due to culture problems at Amazon.

If you think you can change my mind, fine. I'm data driven and respect a desire to improve. But be ready to answer hard questions and take extreme ownership of the problems the public and development communities have with AMZN in the past, and be ready to give me the positional authority to make things better or the answer will still be "No".

I'm a recruiter. I want to offer you a TCS/TATA Consultancy Services Contract role..

I am not interested in any sort of TCS Contract role for any reason as I fully disagree with the racist, discriminatory way they do business at the expensive of minorities.

I have personally seen this racism and abuse firsthand and do not personally feel that TCS contracts are in my best interests, or in the best interests of the technology community.

I do not support TCS as a company. I do not support any company that wants to use them to hire.

I'm a recruiter. I want to offer you a CTS/Cognizant Technical Services Contract role..

I am not interested in any sort of work with CTS as a company as I have firsthand experience with them from when I was at WAG and that was enough for an entire lifetime.

I have personally seen their abuse and morally reprehensible tactics firsthand and do not feel that CTS is in the best interests of the technology community or the world.

I do not support CTS as a company. I do not support any company that wants to use them to hire.

I'm a recruiter. Why do you ask who the end client is?

There are some companies I just wont work for, and I need to be sure you are not asking me to work for one of them.

I also want to be sure I can track double submits and mitigate the risk of them.

It would be unprofessional of me to allow myself to be submitted for a role I was not interested in, so I do not allow it.

To know if I was really interested, I would first need to know the companies reputation, and that is impossible to know unless I know who the company is.

A lot of disreputable and unprofessional staffing companies like to hide this fact and that often creates trouble later on; If you are one of these companies I don't want to work with you anyway.

Mitigating this risk in advance mitigates the risk of these other issues happening later.

I'm a recruiter. Why do you always ask the rate being offered?

I want to mitigate the risk that you have unrealistic low expectations on my worth or the market rates as soon as possible.

I want to make sure you are legitimate and if you know the market rates, that is a signal I can use to know you are legitimate.

It is perfectly acceptable for you to not know the market rates. Just be honest about that fact with me, please.

I prioritize offers to interview based on the amount offered when I can't find anything else about the offers I have that I am really passionate about in order to to tell them apart.

Yes, I use money as the tie-breaker. Most people would lie, give you a BS line, etc. I don't believe in that.

Technology F.A.Q.

What programming language/framework are you comfortable using?

I can use any programming language or framework I feel like with the proper motivation, but I'm most experienced with C#/Python/C/GoLang/C++/ObjectiveC style languages in the past and I mostly work with Python and GoLang right now. I LOVE Python and GoLang's design interests me at a very geeky level.

I am programming language agnostic and would rather have a toolbox than use a single language as a hammer against every problem.

If I do not already know the language or framework, I will tell you.

I will then go get a book on it and then spend time learning it on my own for the fun of it.

What Mobile Development Frameworks do you have the best experience with?

I have experience with Android (Java SDK and C+++ ABI), Apple iOS, as well as other platforms that are no longer market relevant.

As I write this I'm focusing my energy on iOS applications in Objective C and Possibly Swift for the future (As I write this on 2/7/2017) as I want to build 'apps' for my own iDevices.

We use MongoDB as our primary data storage device..

Stop. No. Please. Don't. MongoDB is not ACID Compliant in any sense because its "queue-to-write" and not transaction safe, even in an eventually consistent manner.

Anybody who tells you to use MongoDB "because its web-scale" or "because its fast" is either incompetent or malicious, probably both. Your data WILL get corrupted at high load.

The read speed comes from its in memory storage model; And there are far better in-memory caches out there. Look up "memcache" and "redis" and then either fire the MongoDB guy or hire me to fire them for you.

Some tools are better than others, and some should never be used at all because better options exist for EVERY possible use case. That is generally the case with MongoDB.

When looking at jobs I actively see the use of MongoDB by a company as a red flag that gives a negative view of their leadership's technical competence, as other better options exist for EVERY possible use case that MongoDB Supports. As a result I consider its use to be a distinct sign of ignorance and incompetence.

MongoDB is a Trap. Don't fall for it.

Relocation F.A.Q.

Will you relocate outside of Seattle, WA, USA for any reason?

No.

No.

No.

No.

No.

Why are you not interested in moving to California?

Due to the added taxes and inflation that California Suffers, $1/USD is only worth effectively $0.86 in buying power inside the state of California.

I'm not willing to make 1/5th less on every dollar earned simply by living in California.

Its unrealistic to expect me to live in any area where I can not afford to buy a nice home that has a mortgage payment less than 21% of my yearly annual gross income.

Real Estate Agents hired by companies that wanted to move me to that area state that this is impossible in California.

I am not an expert in that market, so I have no choice but to believe these experts who are telling me its not in my best interests to move to CA.

The drought in California is a significant issue for me. I love the rain, I enjoy not dying of dehydration, and the color green is soothing to me.

Its too crowded and owning a car in CA is cost prohibitive; I value my freedom too much to not have a car and the freedom it provides.

Do you want to live in a closet and pay too much rent or live two hours away? Those are your only choices as a married family in CA.

In many cases, I'm told by people in the Valley that living in a closet in CA is actually too expensive of an option for most people.

Why are you not interested in moving to "The Valley" / San Francisco?

It's in California, so everything above applies.

I find a lot of the culture there best summarized as "Start-up Theater" and I don't like how fake it all is.

I see this common "Start-up Theater" as everything I hate; Fake, Deceptive, Malicious, mostly just work to conceal ineffectiveness, with all that effort simply work to be ineffective.

I do my best work as part of a team of people who ACTUALLY want to make the world a better place, not just want others to THINK they care about making the world a better place.

Why are you not interested in moving to New York?

The reasons for California often apply to NY as well.

New York and NYC are considered the most expensive cities to live in inside the United States.

Imagine a hot wet blanket that sounds like cars and drunk people covering your face.. at 3am. That is NY compared to WA.

Why are you not interested in moving from Seattle, WA at all?

Please see my reasons for not moving to NY or CA.

I have family obligations that keep me in Seattle, WA.

Please don't take this personally. I wouldn't move for FB, GOOG, NFLX, AAPL, or any other other company that asked me to move, either.

Your company is not the first that has wanted to throw 200k+/year base salary at me + Stock + Benefits to move.

Keeping my promises to extended family means more.

Time-zone F.A.Q.

What times of day should we call you?

Between the hours of 7am and 5pm, PST (GMT -8).

I do not take calls from people I don't know and have on my contact list outside of the hours of 7am to 5pm, PST (GMT -8).

This is enforced in a fully automatic way by the "Do not Disturb" feature on my iPhone.

If I give you the OK to call "any-time", I mean it. I also expect you to be professional in your choices of time to call.

What human languages should we use?

English is best as that is my native language.

I know a little Spanish, French, Russian, Italian. Icelandic, and Mandarin but I don't feel at all comfortable speaking them in professional situations.

In a pinch I have carried on entire conversations in languages I do not know using Google translate; but I dislike doing this.

It can lead to some uncomfortable (and often hilarious in retrospect) situations.

In general you should use the best English skills you have when contacting me.

Legal F.A.Q.

Why do you get angry at recruiters who misrepresent roles or use bait and switch tactics?

If you otherwise seek to purchase or license my IP, start the conversation in a friendly tone that recolonizes the fact I own the IP in question, and expect to pay market rates for licensing as I'm generally not the sort of person to sell my IP outright.

I'm a lawyer looking to talk to you about an opportunity to license your IP to my client..

Stop. One of the rules I picked up working as an Executive at a Fortune 50 company is that "Lawyers always only Talk to Other Lawyers".

The result of this is that I simply don't talk to lawyers that don't explicitly work for me. Period.

In the event that a Lawyer reaches out to me for any reason, I will always refer them to my own lawyer, let them sort it out, and then add the cost of my lawyer to any invoice I send out.

Personal F.A.Q.

Who is your spirit animal?

Alexander Hamilton.

Why are you so blunt / honest / funny when you write?

The only truly valuable thing in this world is time. Laughter comes next.

I try to respect your time by getting to the point and giving you the facts.

I personally dislike it when people beat around the bush or delay the truth.

It's in my own best interest that you not waste my time by not having all the facts.